The British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments

In 1994, the British Library Oriental and India Office
Collections acquired a collection of twenty‐nine fragments
of manuscripts written on birch bark scrolls in the
Gāndhārī (a dialect of Prakrit) language and in the
Kharoṣṭhī script. They were contained inside a clay pot,
also bearing an inscription in the same language, in which
they had been buried in antiquity. Preliminary analysis of
these documents indicated that they dated from about the
first century A.D., which would make them the oldest
surviving substantial collection of Buddhist manuscripts,
as well as of any kind of Indian manuscripts.

The exact findspot of these manuscripts is unfortunately
unknown. But in the past several manuscripts of the same
type have been reported to have been found in or around
Haḍḍa near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, although none
of these have ever been published and most of them
apparently are now lost. It is therefore likely that the
new manuscripts came from the same region. This area
closely adjoins the region known in ancient times as
Gandhāra, the homeland of the Gāndhārī language and
Kharoṣṭhī script, which were current from about the third
century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.

Gandhāra has long been known as one of the main centers of
Buddhist art and culture during the early part of the
Christian era, as attested by its abundant archaeological,
art historical, and inscriptional remains. But until now,
only one specimen of a Gandhāran Buddhist text, namely the
famous Gāndhārī Dharmapada (definitively edited
by John Brough in 1962), was known. The new manuscripts
therefore provide unprecedented insights into the scope
and composition of the long-hypothesized, and now actually
discovered, body of Gandhāran Buddhist literature. More
broadly, it will provide us with the earliest documentary
evidence of the contents of any of the Buddhist canons.

The twenty‐nine fragments comprise portions of twenty or
more originally separate scrolls, ranging in size from a
few words to several hundred lines of writing. The texts
comprise a wide variety of Buddhist texts of various
genres, including:

Verse compilations such as Gāndhārī versions of the
“Rhinoceros Sūtra,” previously known in Pali as the
Khaggavisāna‐sutta of the Sutta‐nipāta, and of the
“Songs of Lake Anavatapta” (Anavatapta‐gāthā), which is
known in later versions in Sanskrit, Chinese and
Tibetan.

Canonical sūtras and commentaries, including a large
fragment of the Saṅgīti‐sūtra with a previously unknown
commentary.

Abhidharma and other technical and scholastic texts,
mostly as yet identified.

Large numbers of avadānas or edifying legends, many of
which seem not to have direct parallels in other Indian
Buddhist traditions, and which therefore may represent
local or sectarian compositions.

While some of the texts, including the examples noted
above, can be directly identified with or at least related
to texts extant in other languages such as Pali, Sanskrit,
or Chinese, the majority of them, including many of the
avadānas and the commentaries, appear to have no parallels
in the previously known Buddhist literatures.

Among the grounds for dating the collection are references
in two separate texts of the avadāna class to the Great
Satrap Jihonika and to the Commander Aśpavarma, both of
whom are known from inscriptions and coins to have ruled
in Gandhāra in the early part of the first century.
Furthermore, the manuscripts were associated with a group
of clay jars bearing Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions, one of which
mentions the names of two other historical personages, the
royal official Suhasoma and his wife Vasavadatta, who are
also known from other inscriptions to have lived at about
the same time.

The inscription on the jar in which the manuscripts were
found records its dedication to the teachers of the
Dharmaguptaka school, suggesting that the manuscripts
belonged to the library of a monastery of this school.
This sectarian affiliation has been confirmed by the
discovery of strikingly close parallels between some of
their texts and Dharmaguptaka texts extant in Chinese.
For example, the Saṅgīti‐sutra text referred to above has
a much closer relationship to the Chinese Dharmaguptaka
version of this text than to the other versions of it that
are extant in Pali and Sanskrit.

It is therefore reasonably certain that the British
Library Kharoṣṭhī scrolls represent a sampling of the
textual corpus of a Dharmaguptaka monastery of the late
Indo‐Scythian period. It now appears that the
Dharmaguptaka school had a much more influential role in
this early phase of Gandhāran Buddhism than has hitherto
been realized, and this fits in with its prominent place
in early central Asian and Chinese Buddhism. For
Gandhāra, with its strategic location at the crossroads of
the routes between India, the west, and central and east
Asia, played a critical role in the spread of Buddhism
beyond its Indian homeland, and the new evidence strongly
supports the theory that the Gandhāran followers of the
Dharmaguptaka school played a prominent role in this
process.

Moreover, the discovery of a substantial corpus of
Buddhist manuscripts in the Gāndhārī language supports the
“Gāndhārī hypothesis” proposed in the past by Ernst
Waldschmidt, John Brough and other scholars. According to
this theory, at least some of the earliest Chinese
translations of Buddhist texts were prepared from
originals, not in Sanskrit as previously assumed, but
rather in Gāndhārī. Since the existence of such a body of
Gāndhārī literature is now a matter of fact rather than of
hypothesis, there is good reason to believe that the newly
discovered manuscripts are closely related to the
archetypes of the earliest Buddhist texts in Chinese. Thus
these new discoveries constitute a missing link between
Buddhism in its Indian homeland and its later
manifestations in China and other parts of Asia.